Possibly The Funniest Movie Review Ever

Since Expelled takes itself so serious, at least one reviewer got the spirit right.

Expelled: Stopped Before It Enters Canada

Before the abominable waste of film called Expelled makes its way into Canada it's been stalled because they didn't license some of their soundtrack.

Somehow, given the intellectual dishonesty of the movie, it doesn't surprise me that they think that copyright law doesn't apply to them.

Expelled: The Background Reality

Via Pharyngula, we find that someone decided to introduce the allegations of the movie "Expelled" to the shredder of fact by actually doing - you know, research.

Unsurprisingly, when you examine each case in detail, the talking points collapse pretty quickly. (It's not unlike the talking points Alberta politician Ted Morton was tossing about not so long ago) - look at the case objectively, and the talking points collapse under the weight of context and reality.

No, Jason of Shock-and-Blog, this isn't about being "afraid" of anything, it's about intellectual honesty - something long lost on the makers of Expelled and those who think it's got any basis in some factual reality. (But then, religionists will use anything to justify playing the "persecuted" card)

No, no, that's not the point...

In what he thinks is a revelation, we find the resident genius over at "shock and blog" whining because critics of the film "Expelled" just won't give the movie a break.

It's the half-baked claim that he uses to justify it that gets me though:

So really, what the critics of "Expelled" have a problem with is the origins of life, even though they claim evolution has no opinion on the issue. ... Funny how no one ever defined science as excluding any sort of intelligent designer.

This couldn't be further from the truth. The simple reality is that there is no testable means to test the claim of an intelligent designer. Period. You can claim it all you like, but you cannot demonstrate it in any meaningful sense. (and no, a Behe-style argument-by-credulity approach doesn't count either)

The second, and more serious problem with the film, is the fact that it grossly mischaracterizes the political/academic situation by essentially claiming that the oh-so-evil evolutionists are trying to suppress a valid theory. Nothing could be further from the truth, but none of ID's proponents has come up with anything that substantiates their claims that would survive peer review.

The reason that science in general has no opinion on the "origins" of life is because to this point, there is no means to prove or disprove what exactly happened at the moment that life became identifiable. In the purest sense of the word, science is quite atheistic (in the "without god" sense, not the "excluding god" sense that is so often inferred). Science in general concerns itself with what it can describe based on what we know, not the utterly unknowable.

Along the lines of the classic philosophical "brain in a bucket" model, we cannot prove the validity of anything that we cannot describe with our senses. However unlikely, it is possible that our entire experience is the result of someone artificially stimulating our brain while it sloshes about in a bucket of fluid somewhere. Since we have no means to prove or disprove the assertion that we are just floating in a bucket somewhere, we cannot meaningfully support it or refute it.

Accepting as "fact" the notion of an "intelligent designer" being involved in the creation of life falls into the same category - it is simply an assertion. As a hypothesis, it remainjavascript:void(0)
Publish Posts quite untestable - which is why ID doesn't even qualify as valid science.